Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Al Queda #2 Has Alzheimers

I base my claim that Ayman al-Zawahiri is suffering Alzheimer's or some other form of senility for he has recently charged that Iran is a "collaborator" with the United States in the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. That is just one piece of evidence but it is probative. In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I have no medical degree nor any competence in physical and mental health.

There are two alternatives to this psychiatric diagnosis. One is that he is simply mentally ill, suffering from the delusion that Iran and the United States have important interests in common. The only evidence I can think of for that is both want a compliant Iraq. However, Iran wants Iraq to be subservient to them and we, or rather our government, wants Iraq to be subservient to us. Therefore, I say al-Zawahiiri has a paranoid personality and suffers from serious political delusions. In support of that analysis is the fact that al-Zawahiri lives in caves. Only crazy people live in caves these days.

The third possibility is that al-Zawahiri is so cut off from news that he has no idea what is going on. However, if his cave has all mod cons, these would include electricity and a satellite dish and receiver and a monitor. His claim is that the US and Iran both support the "hireling governments" of Iraq and Afghanistan but this similarity is like the other one. They both support the government because the US can leave only, so it says, if the government can run the country and Iraq can't fall into a state of anarchy until we leave, a state that Iran will find it easy to exploit, at least for awhile. Iran might suffer the same fate as the US has. We liberated them from Saddam (and from fresh pure running water, electricity, sewage treatment, etc. ) but the day after we were unwelcome. Iran is a Muslim theocracy, which ought to please the Iraqis, but they are the wrong kind of Muslims for the Sunnis and the Kurds (who really don't count since they already have set up an independent Kurdish state), and much more important, they aren't Arabs.

For reasons I cannot quite explain, I had the feeling in reading this that I had on listening to the Weather Underground back in the late 60's. As I listened to the latter (in teach ins that I ran at the University of Illinois) it became clear to me that being against the war wasn't good enough for the Weather Underground. One had to be against it for the right reasons, that is their reasons. The WU was promoting revolution so one had to see the Vietnam War as a colonial war and see the government as fascist. Their arguments would play out better today in connection with the Iraq War since the Bush government is much more interested in suppressing our legal rights than were the governments of Johnson and Nixon.

So, al-Zawahiri is pissed at the Iranians for making nice with the Iraq government even though Iran is as close what bin Laden wants for S. Arabia as any other large Muslim country, namely it is a state run by religious zealots. A more rational course might be to applaud Iran and bitch at, say, Jordan or S. Arabia or the Gulf States for collaborating with us.

I assumed you were acquainted with the TV commercials for Holiday Inn Express that ran so much about a year ago.

The commercials involved a person who seemed to be an expert about one thing or another leading bystanders to conclude that he possessed the proper credentials when, in fact, he had merely stayed at a Holiday Inn Express. That always gave me a chuckle.